Rocket Boys

by Homer Hickam

  “Why? You afraid they’ll think I’m your girlfriend?”

  “I’m just kind of embarrassed. I can pick a suit out by myself.”

  She eyed me, a doubtful expression on her face. “Oh, all right,” she sighed. “Meet me at the parking building in an hour. And wear your new suit. I want to see it on you.”

  I agreed, took a deep breath, and went inside. Philips and Cloony was a tiny shop, but it had the reputation of being the best men’s store in the county. Its walls were lined with racks of suits and shirts, and it smelled to me like dry-cleaning fluid. When I told the clerk what I wanted, he asked me if I was Jim Hickam’s brother. When I said yes, he called the owners down from their apartment upstairs. They were a married couple, a big chunky man and a tiny, bubbly woman. They came padding in with their eyes lit up like cats finding a bunny in the vegetable garden. They said they missed Jim and wondered how they could help me. I told them about the National Science Fair, and they began to lay out brown, blue, and gray suits for me to consider.

  They were the kinds of suits the men in Coalwood wore to church. I scratched my head, unsure of myself. Mom had always bought my clothes. Then O’Dell came into the shop. He was in Welch selling more ginseng for our zinc-dust money and had seen me from the street. “Emily Sue’s right!” he brayed when I told him my situation. “You need some new duds!”

  O’Dell looked through the suits the owners had put out, shaking his head. “Old people’s clothes,” he said. He went through the racks until he found one in the back he liked. He hauled it out to show me. “Man, you’d look great in this!” he said, and I had to agree. It was the finest-looking suit I’d ever seen.

  I tried on O’Dell’s suit. It was a perfect fit, and it cost only twenty-five dollars, marked down from twenty-seven fifty. “I’ll take it!” I chirped, mining this way and then that while looking in the mirror. The owners looked at each other and shrugged.

  I exited the shop, dressed in my fine new suit. I couldn’t wait to show it off to Emily Sue. I waved good-bye to O’Dell. He was going to see his ginseng buyer, with two grocery bags full of the root. “After I sell all this, we’ll be able to buy enough zinc dust to go to the moon,” he promised.

  I was a little early to meet Emily Sue, so I walked down to the main street. It was clogged with shoppers. I noticed I was getting some stares from some of them. I guessed they hadn’t seen a high-school boy dressed so fine since my brother had left the county. I strutted to the big concrete municipal-parking building, a three-tiered structure that was the pride of the city. It was advertised as the first of its type in the United States, a place where cars were parked on three levels in the same building. I gawked at it every time I saw it. It was too imposing for a Coalwood boy. That’s why I chose to park behind the Carter Hotel.

  I wormed my way through a crowd of people and saw a table with a JACK KENNEDY FOR PRESIDENT sign on it. Some men were setting up some loudspeakers. Then the martial strains of “Anchors Aweigh” blared out, followed by “High Hopes,” sung by Frank Sinatra. “What’s going on?” I asked a man putting up a Kennedy poster on a telephone pole.

  He looked me over, as if maybe I had two heads, and then said, “The senator’s going to make a speech right here in Welch. He’ll be here any minute.”

  Attracted by the music, more people were crowding in. Somehow, Emily Sue found me. She took one look and said, “Oh, my stars!” Her mouth stayed open.

  I thought there was something going on behind me that had scared her. I looked over my shoulder, but didn’t see anything. “What?” I demanded, turning back.

  Her mouth was still open. “What color is that?”

  “My suit?” I looked at my sleeve. “I dunno. It’s sort of an orange, I guess.”

  “Orange! You bought an orange suit?”

  I shrugged. “Well, yeah …”

  Just then, a convoy of Lincolns and Cadillacs wheeled into the parking building, their tires shrieking. Emily Sue and I had to step aside or we’d have been run over. We found ourselves tight up front in the crowd. “Hey, this is great!” I said.

  Emily Sue hadn’t even glanced at the signs or the cars. She was still staring at me. “You don’t like my suit?” I asked her. “O’Dell came by and helped me pick it out.”

  She slowly shook her head and then said, “That explains everything.”

  The crowd was applauding politely as a man got out of one of the Lincolns. He waved and I guessed he was Senator Kennedy. When he was hoisted to the top of a Cadillac, I knew I was right. He was a thin man with a large head and a lot of hair and a brown face. My first thought when I saw him was to wonder how in the world it was possible to get such a tan in the spring. The senator waved again, cleared his throat—somebody handed him up a glass of water, which he sipped—and then he started to talk. The crowd was milling, not everybody paying attention. He was giving it his all though, and I thought it only polite to listen. His speech, delivered with a clenched fist punching out nearly every word, was about Appalachia (which I was surprised to hear we were part of) and the need for the government to help the whole area, maybe, he said, with a TVA-style project. I’d been taught about the Tennessee Valley Authority in high-school history. Mr. Jones said President Roosevelt had used it to help the economy of the hill country of Tennessee and Alabama. I heard my dad say once to my uncle Ken that the TVA was just socialism, pure and simple. Uncle Ken said it wasn’t either, that it was just the government looking out for the little man. Dad had replied that the government didn’t look out for anybody but itself.

  The senator kept talking. I noticed that his hand crept to his back, pushing in the small of it like it hurt him there. He stood stiffly, like one of Dad’s junior engineers after their first day in the mine. His eyes had kind of a sad look to them too. I thought he was in some pain, either in his back or somewhere else.

  The Welch audience stayed attentive but quiet as Senator Kennedy promised to create a food-stamp program. The men who had gotten out of the Lincolns and Cadillacs applauded at the proposal, but they were joined by only a few people in the crowd. The senator paused and brushed the hair from his forehead in a nervous gesture. “I think the people of this state need and deserve a helping hand, and I’m going to see that you get it!” he shouted, socking the air. Only silence came back at him. I noticed some people starting to leave. The senator frowned and looked worried, and I felt sorry for him. “How about some questions?” he asked. He sounded a little desperate.

  My hand shot up. For some reason, he noticed me right off. “Yes. The boy in the, um, suit.”

  “Oh, God,” Emily Sue groaned. “You’re going to embarrass the whole county.”

  I ignored her. “Yessir. What do you think the United States ought to do in space?”

  “Oh, please, God,” Emily Sue groaned anew.

  There was a stirring in the crowd, a few hoots of derision, but Kennedy smiled. “Well, some of my opponents think I should go into space,” he said. With that, he got himself some appreciative laughter. He looked at me. “But I’ll ask you, young man: What do you think we ought to do in space?”

  As it happened, lately I had been thinking about the moon a lot. In between spring storms, Jake’s telescope allowed me to walk down the rills and climb the mountains and stroll the maria of the moon in my mind. It helped me when I was sad about Daisy Mae, or worried about my parents moving to Myrtle Beach, or contemplating my future. The moon had become near and familiar, and that’s why my answer just sort of popped out. “We should go to the moon!” I said.

  The senator’s entourage laughed, but he shushed them with an irritable wave of his hand. “And why do you think we should go to the moon?” he asked me.

  I looked around and saw men in their miners’ helmets, so I said, “We should go there and find out what it’s made of and mine it just like we mine coal here in West Virginia.”

  There was more laughing, until one of the miners spoke up. “That boy’s right! We could mine that old moon
good!”

  “Hell,” another miner shouted out, “West Virginians could mine anything!”

  A ripple of good-natured applause went through the crowd. There were a lot of grins. Nobody was leaving.

  Kennedy seemed to be energized by the response. “If I’m elected president,” he said, “I think maybe we will go to the moon.” He swept his eyes across the people, now attentive. “I like what this young man says. The important thing is to get the country moving again, to restore vigor and energy to the people and the government. If going to the moon will help us do that, then maybe that’s what we should do. My fellow Americans, join with me and we will together take this country forward.…”

  The crowd responded heartily. Kennedy was talking about working to make the country great again, when Emily Sue dragged me away. “What’re you doing?” I demanded. “I’m having fun.”

  “We’re going back to Philips and Cloony before they close.”

  “What for?”

  “You’re not going to Indianapolis in that orange suit. It’s the most carnival thing I’ve ever seen!”

  I stopped dead in my tracks. “I like my suit.”

  She started to argue, but then said, “I don’t doubt it.” She put her hand on my back and propelled me forward.

  It was after dark by the time we got back to Coalwood. I came inside wearing a dark blue suit, which I hated even as Mom and Emily Sue’s mother praised it. Mom said she’d never seen me so handsome. I could only wish she’d seen me in the O’Dell suit. I told her about the senator instead. “You wouldn’t believe the things Sonny said to him,” Emily Sue sighed.

  Dad came in and gave my suit a quick inspection. I told him about the senator. “Kennedy?” He frowned. “A damn pinko if there ever was one.”

  Dad left, heading outside, probably to go up to the mine. Mom looked after him and murmured, “A good-looking pinko, that’s for sure.”

  After Emily Sue left, I went upstairs and hung my dreary new suit in my closet. At least I had one thing to comfort me. In the jacket pocket was a new tie I’d bought when Emily Sue wasn’t looking. It was a glossy light blue, about six inches wide, and painted on it was a big red cardinal, the West Virginia bird. The cardinal was looking up at the sky, and its bright orange beak was open as if it was singing. It was a glorious tie, one that could be spotted clear across a room, which I figured was an important attribute. If I couldn’t wear O’Dell’s suit, I was still going to show the National Science Fair at least a little Big Creek Missile Agency style.

  25

  THE NATIONAL SCIENCE FAIR

  THE MONTH FOLLOWING the science fair in Bluefield seemed to flash by. There was so much to do to get ready. Happily, Miss Riley seemed to blossom with the spring. The color returned to her cheeks, and her eyes became bright once more. Every day after classes were done, she worked with me on my presentation skills. She also called teachers in other high schools who had sent students to the nationals, just to get some tips on how to prepare and present. Every day I honed my spiel a little more so that I could quickly deliver a learned presentation on the mathematics of the design of De Laval nozzles, the calculations of specific impulse and mass ratios, and the trigonometry of altitudes needed for an amateur rocketry test range.

  Quentin came to my house on weekends and helped me prepare charts and diagrams of the nozzle functions, rocket trajectories, and fin designs. O’Dell found a piece of black velvet somewhere on which to lay out our rocket hardware. He also built some wooden boxes to hold it all, cushioned with newspaper for protection. Sherman and Billy took photographs of Cape Coalwood and put them in a photo album. Roy Lee made three-by-five cards for each nozzle, nose cone, and casement, with a description of its dimensions and function.

  While the boys and I kept our eye on the National Science Fair, the Coalwood mine continued to be idle. Some miners, desperate to make some money, tried to enter to work on the hoot-owl shift, but were chased away by union picketers. The company store gave credit until it couldn’t anymore. Neither the company nor the union seemed to be in any mood to settle.

  Mr. Caton had gone begging to Mr. Dubonnet, and the union chief had unbent just enough to let him build me the nozzles, casements, fins, and nose cones I needed for my display. One set of nozzles showed evolutionary BCMA designs, from the simple countersink version to our latest beauty with an ablative coating. They were all jewels. Mr. Caton had done himself especially proud on one of them, cutting all the waste metal off it until the converging/diverging angles could be seen from the outside. I was certain it looked as good as any nozzle on any rocket taking off from Cape Canaveral.

  I went to the union hall and thanked Mr. Dubonnet for letting Mr. Caton do the work. “Just tell them your hardware was built by the UMWA,” he said grimly. He had a right to be grim. I knew he was completely out of strike funds and the commodity food from the state was dwindling. I felt nearly ashamed to bother him with my rockets.

  At home, Dad still went to work every day, joining his foremen for safety inspections and even rock dusting when necessary. He passed by all our display preparations in the basement going and coming from the mine, but said nothing to me about them. He was gone by the time I got up in the morning, and I was either in my room studying or in bed by the time he got home. He had kept his promise to help me when I asked for it, but seemed to take very little interest in my upcoming trip to Indianapolis. I didn’t expect anything else.

  On the weekend before I left, I heard Mom pester him about whether he had told the company that he was moving to Myrtle Beach. “I’ve got to wait until the strike’s over, Elsie,” he said.

  “Why?”

  “Because I don’t want the union to think they ran me off.”

  Mom seemed to accept that explanation but I was suspicious. For one thing, since when did Dad care what the union thought? For another, I couldn’t imagine Dad leaving without choosing and thoroughly training his replacement. To do that, he’d have to let the company know his plans as early as possible. I also hadn’t heard a single peep from the gossip fence about my parents moving. I knew Mom hadn’t talked about it, because she considered it a private matter. But it just didn’t seem possible that Dad hadn’t said something to somebody at the mine about it. Just one little comment would have had the fence buzzing, but all was quiet or one of the boys would have mentioned it to me. So what did Dad really plan on doing? I was too busy to do anything but wonder.

  On the night before I was to leave for Indianapolis, Quentin spent the night at my house, not letting me sleep, drilling me incessantly on the details of the trigonometry, calculus, physics, chemistry, and differential equations we used for our rocket designs. Finally, at about three in the morning, I collapsed on my bed and pulled the pillow over my ears. “No more, Q,” I begged. “For the love of God, no more.”

  Through the pillow, I heard him clear his throat. “Is it your plan, then, Sonny my boy, to disgrace the entire state of West Virginia with your confounded ignorance?”

  I pulled the pillow away. “Again,” I sighed.

  “That’s the style!” he said brightly. “All right, old chap. An easy one. Define specific impulse.”

  “Specific impulse is defined as the thrust in pounds of a given propellant divided by its consumption rate.”

  “And what good is knowing that?”

  I let out a long breath. “It’s a means of determining the relative merits of propellants. By using the number denoting the specific impulse, calculations can be made to determine the exhaust velocity of a rocket and ultimately its overall performance.”

  “Good. Now, what do we mean by the weight flow coefficient?”

  I let out a groan, stared up at the ceiling, and kept talking. Compared to Quentin, Indianapolis had to be a snap.

  THE big Trailways bus at the Welch station accepted my panels and boxes of hardware in its yawning luggage bays. The boys, Mom and Dad, Mr. Caton, Mr. Ferro, Mr. Dubonnet, Melba June, and Mr. Turner were all there to see me off
. Basil was there too, scribbling furiously. The Welch Daily News had stolen a bit of his thunder with an article about us and our science-fair wins. Basil was determined to outdo the bigger paper by the use of adjectives alone, if necessary.

  Emily Sue was also there. She made me open my suitcase and show her my new blue suit. She chucked me on the shoulder like a boy and said, “I guess you’ll at least look good.”

  Just for a moment, I thought I saw Geneva Eggers in the back of the crowd, but when I looked again, I couldn’t see her. Dorothy wasn’t there either, of course, and I hadn’t expected her to be. Melba June gave me a kiss right on my mouth in front of my mother, making me turn nearly purple with embarrassment. “Go get ’em, tiger,” she grinned.

  Just before I climbed aboard the bus, I was happy to see Jake roll up in his Corvette. I was even happier to see Miss Riley in the passenger seat. Jake got out and clapped me on the shoulder. “Heard you’ve been doing great things, Sonny. I had to come back to see you off. You know this lady?”

  I went over to Miss Riley. She opened the car door and I knelt beside her when she didn’t make any move to get out. I wondered if she was feeling tired again. “Show them what West Virginians can do, Sonny,” she said, holding her hand out to me.

  “Yes, ma’am!” I promised, shaking her hand. We looked at each other, and she pulled me in and gave me a big hug.

  Mom patted me on my arm at the door of the bus. “Good boy,” she said. Dad shook my hand without comment, scowling because he had just caught sight of Mr. Dubonnet. The two were taking turns giving each other dirty looks as my bus pulled out.

  I sank back into my seat and the bus rolled through the night. I slept through most of it and awoke at first light and was startled when I couldn’t see any mountains, just a flat plain as far as I could see. I almost felt naked. We arrived in the city around noon, and I unloaded my displays at the cavernous Indiana Exposition Hall. I was directed to an area on the outer edge of the displays with other exhibitors of propulsion projects. I made a quick inspection of their displays and was relieved to find that none of them approached the sophistication of the BCMA’s designs. A lantern-jawed boy from Lubbock, Texas, set up beside me. He was wearing a cowboy hat. He had two designs, one of them using plumbing hardware for rocket nozzles, the other a demonstration of an electromagnetic launcher, with little colored lights that ran the length of a track, that sent a little ball bearing flying off at a pretty good clip. We became instant friends. His name was Orville, but he asked me to call him “Tex.”